Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 11

by Fujino Omori

  “Why are you going this far?”

  It was the first question she had asked him.

  The Sword Princess who had refused to listen to him now stared into his eyes across their locked blades.

  Bell returned her gaze with a surprised look and shouted his reply.

  “I want to help that girl!”

  “Really? Are you telling me the truth? She’s not a person; she’s a monster!”

  “She’s different from ordinary monsters! She can talk! We can smile at each other! We can hold hands—she has the same emotions that you and I do!” he retorted, determined not to give in to the weight of Aiz’s sword.

  “You’re wrong. Not everyone can do those things.”

  By “those things,” she meant, at the very least, hold hands with a monster.

  With each word, the sword she held with one hand pushed against Bell’s knife.

  “Eh?”

  “Monsters kill people. They can take so, so many lives…They make people shed so many tears.”

  “But…don’t we adventurers do exactly the same thing?” Bell spat back at her. Each word felt as if it were slicing through his own body.

  “…?”

  “Your sword and my knife do those things!”

  If they wanted to, they could massacre thousands of people. Rationality was all that stopped them. Rationality and the sense of fraternity that the Xenos, too, possessed.

  Some monsters were kinder than humans.

  Some hunters were more hideous than monsters.

  Where was the line that divided them?

  Bell pushed away Aiz’s sword as he pled with her.

  “I…”

  Aiz hesitated, standing a few steps back from Bell.

  It would be a lie to say that Bell had never thought about the things she’d said. She was right. Essentially, he knew which side he should choose. But then the smiling faces of Wiene and Lido and the others rose before his mind’s eye. He thought of their tears. He recalled Dix’s howling laughter and the words of Fels.

  A bat—a hypocrite.

  Bell took all this in and made his decision.

  He would tell Aiz the true feelings that had been smoldering within him, the final statement he hadn’t been able to say out loud.

  “…I want a place where we can live together with them.”

  There—he had finally said it to his idol, the girl who stopped time.

  “I want a world where they can smile!”

  His foolish wishes echoed in Aiz’s ears.

  “What are you talking about…?” she whispered in astonishment.

  Her eyes said that she could not—and did not want to—understand.

  They stood on separate sides of the line, she bathed in moonlight, he in dark shadows.

  Aiz turned her face away from Bell.

  “I’ve had enough…get out of my way.”

  As if his ragged body were telling him it had reached its limit, Bell’s knees sank to the ground. He looked up from below her, his eyes filled with suffering.

  But he did not retreat.

  “I don’t want to…”

  “Stop it.”

  “I don’t want to…”

  “I’m asking you, please.”

  “—I can’t!”

  “—Move!”

  Both of them were shouting at each other more loudly than they ever had before.

  Her hair swaying, Aiz closed the gap between them and thrust her sword before his eyes.

  “I’ll cut you.”

  “…!”

  “It’s gonna hurt a lot, so…”

  Those clumsy words were her last warning.

  Bell’s throat trembled at the cold air around the tip of her sword, but still he did not move.

  Her gaze was filled with sadness. Bell’s chest overflowed with an inescapable pain.

  The next instant, eyes flashing with determination, the Sword Princess directed all her energy into the tip of her blade.

  Bell squinted as the blinding moonlight glinted off her sword.

  “—No!”

  The door behind Bell burst open, and a figure rushed into his field of vision.

  Her robe fluttered as her hood fell back from her face.

  She leaped forward, both arms outstretched, directly in front of him and Aiz.

  “Leave Bell alone!!”

  Her high voice rang out, exactly like a human’s.

  Time stood still as Bell stared at her back with its single new wing, and Aiz gaped at her bluish-silver hair and strange bluish-white face. A fragmented word fell from Bell’s lips.

  “Wie…ne…?”

  Pulling himself back into the present, Bell screamed into the oculus that the dragon girl held in one hand.

  “Goddess, why?!”

  “…”

  The oculus was silent.

  Ignoring Bell, who had not yet recovered from his frustration and confusion at this sudden change, Wiene stood protectively in front of him and stared into Aiz’s eyes.

  “Please…don’t hurt Bell.”

  “…!”

  At the sight of Wiene’s amber eyes, Aiz felt her expression crumble.

  The entreaty of the monster shielding Bell seemed to shake her heart. The dragon girl’s actions and words confirmed what Bell had said to her just moments before.

  “Stop…Please don’t talk,” she said. Unable to regain her composure, Aiz looked down and hid her eyes behind her bangs. “…Why do creatures like you exist?”

  Bell shivered at her quiet, dispirited words. He sensed something unknown in the blank expression on Aiz’s—no, the Sword Princess’s—face as she slowly raised it.

  Wiene, too, froze at the extremely overbearing energy from the girl’s thin body.

  “What do you and your kind want?”

  “I…I want to stay with Bell.”

  “—I won’t let you do that.”

  Aiz’s eyes narrowed to slits as sharp as her sword.

  “I’ll never let you have your way on the surface like those other monsters,” she declared, aiming both her words and her sword at the dragon girl. “Your claws can hurt people. Your wing can frighten them. That stone in your forehead can kill so many of them.”

  Her words were filled with condemnation and hatred and rejection.

  This was not the usual Aiz. Her unhesitating enumeration of reasons spoke to the strength of her will. This wasn’t the Aiz Bell knew.

  What was driving her?

  Anger? Hatred? Sorrow? Hope?

  He was on the verge of touching the darkness within her—no, her very core.

  “I can’t turn a blind eye to you,” she said.

  As Bell listened to Aiz declare anew her fundamental rejection of Wiene and her intention to kill her, he forgot to even breathe. She seemed about to slice him to pieces with a conviction and resolution as sharp as her sword.

  Wiene, Aiz’s sword pinning her in place, looked down at her hands as Bell sat unable to speak.

  “…”

  She stared at her bluish-white palms and at the sharp claws that had hurt Bell just like Aiz had said. Quietly, she wrapped her right hand around the claws of her left.

  “Huh?”

  Bell had noticed too late.

  Breathing raggedly as Aiz looked on in amazement, the dragon girl broke them all off in a single movement.

  “Wiene?!”

  Next, she did the same to her left hand.

  After she snapped them off, the cracked claws pattered onto the cobblestones. Wiene ignored Bell’s cries for her to stop and brought her bloodied hands to her wing.

  “Uaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!”

  As if offering up a payment for her sins, the girl ripped her dragon wing from her body.

  “—”

  The wing, with its ashen skin stretched across a bluish-silver framework of bones, fell at the feet of the dumbfounded Aiz.

  The girl’s slim arms, filled just a moment before with a dragon’s power, now dropp
ed limply to her sides. As she collapsed toward the ground, Bell caught her in his arms. The lifeblood that poured from her bluish-white skin and stained Bell’s armor a brilliant red was exactly the same as Aiz’s.

  Bell put pressure on her back, frantically trying to stem the bleeding from where wing and skin had been moments before, as Wiene slumped against his chest and looked up at Aiz.

  “If I…What if I disappeared?”

  Struggling to breathe, she brought one hand to the stone in her forehead.

  “This time, I’ll really disappear…”

  She moved her hand from her forehead to her chest—to the place where her magic stone, the core of every monster, resided.

  Bell’s face distorted with grief, and Aiz’s crumbled.

  Slowly and quietly, Wiene spoke again.

  “…I was always alone. It was cold and dark…and I…before I became myself…I was always alone. Nobody came to save me. Nobody held me…”

  She spoke hoarsely, from the depths of her darkest memories.

  “I was cut; I was hurt…It was scary and lonely,” she whispered. Even breathing seemed a struggle. She looked up into Aiz’s golden eyes, almost the same color as her amber ones.

  “But Bell saved me when I was all alone.”

  “!”

  “When I was in the darkness…and nobody would save me, Bell came to my rescue!” she shouted.

  The transformation was dramatic. As she listened, Aiz’s mask dissolved. She stood silently, as if she had discovered something within a bleak winter landscape. She must have been imagining it. From the monster girl’s fragmented story, she must have been piecing together what she had seen, what she had felt. Or perhaps she could see it through her own golden eyes.

  She had forgotten everything beyond the girl’s tears.

  “I want to stay with Bell…!”

  The innocent monster was not explaining herself or trying to prove anything but rather expressing her wish. Before the sword that would take her life, she had revealed the depths of her heart.

  Aiz’s gaze wavered at the dragon girl’s tearful voice. The tip of her sword quivered for a moment, too, as if in hesitation.

  The sword that she could neither drive home nor withdraw glinted with her agony. The blade that she was ostensibly holding against Wiene seemed to be cutting into her own flesh.

  Reason and emotion battled within her heart as she fought her own internal contradictions. Then a light shone in her eyes—not a glint of pain and confusion but, instead, something resembling a drop of the moon.

  Sorrow?

  Envy?

  What did Aiz see in Wiene?

  As Bell, who had protected the vouivre from the start, stood there unable to speak…Aiz hung her golden head.

  She looked precisely like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

  She lowered the sword that had been pressed to Wiene’s chest.

  “…I can’t kill the vouivre,” she mumbled in a voice drained of all energy.

  “Miss…Aiz…”

  “I…I can’t help feeling you two were right…that’s why I can’t do it.”

  “…”

  “I can’t fight you anymore…”

  As she stood there with her eyes to the ground, bathed in moonlight, she looked tremendously small to Bell. Not an adventurer, not the Sword Princess—simply a girl.

  In an attempt to hide the tightness in his chest, Bell wrapped his arm around Wiene’s shoulder.

  After a moment, Aiz withdrew an elixir from the pouch at her waist, set it on the cobblestones almost as if she was dropping it, and turned away from them.

  “I can’t save you…I’ll be here.”

  “Miss Aiz…”

  “Go.”

  “…Thank you.”

  Bell picked up the elixir and, with Wiene leaning on his shoulder, walked away.

  After a few moments, he looked back one last time at Aiz’s distant figure. She was standing with her back to them, her golden hair blowing in the wind. To Bell, she looked so ephemeral she might disappear at any moment.

  “…”

  Aiz stood rooted to the ground. She had even forgotten to return her sword to its scabbard.

  The drifting clouds and silvery moonlight looked down on her.

  “Aiz.”

  “…”

  It was Bete.

  The young werewolf had descended from above. He stared at the girl’s face, half-hidden by her bangs.

  “Everythin’ okay?”

  “…Yes.”

  She nodded listlessly at his question, although perhaps she had taken it in a different way than he intended. She did not say anything else.

  “I’ll head back first,” Bete said.

  “…Thank you…very much.”

  “Why the hell are you thanking me?” he said, spitting on the ground before walking off.

  Stillness descended once again.

  Left alone, the girl whispered something to herself, then gazed up at the deep-blue night sky.

  “Bell, does this hurt?”

  “Are you hurt, Wiene?”

  I’ve taken off my armor, and Wiene is prodding me gently all over.

  We’re in a large abandoned building some distance from where we left Aiz. In the weedy ruins of this stone structure with half its roof missing, we patch up each other’s wounds the best we can. Or more accurately, we apply the elixir Aiz gave us.

  Wiene has taken off her robe and is as naked as the day she was born—although I’ve gotten her to at least cover her chest. Her wounds have all closed up, but even the elixir can’t bring back her claws and wing. If that kind of miracle were possible, of course, Nahza wouldn’t be walking around with a prosthetic arm…

  As for me, despite my many wounds, not one was life-threatening.

  I wonder if Aiz was going easy on me all the way to the end, despite what she said.

  I’ve still got a long way to go…

  “I’m no match for her,” I mutter as I put my armor back on and help Wiene pull on her robe, which now has a gaping hole in the back.

  We have no time to rest. We need to get to Fels and the other Xenos as fast as we can.

  “Master Bell! Lady Wiene!”

  “Haruhime!”

  Just as we are about to leave, she appears in the abandoned building, oculus in hand.

  The instant Wiene sees her, she flies to Haruhime and wraps her in a tearful embrace. Haruhime is crying, too, as she pulls Wiene’s delicate bluish-white body close.

  “Haruhime, did everything go all right?”

  “Yes. Lady Aisha came to my rescue…What about you two?” she asks timidly.

  “…We’re fine.”

  Haruhime must have heard about our exchange with Aiz from the goddess. I smile awkwardly back at her.

  “Well, we’d better get going,” I say, steering the conversation in a different direction.

  “Uh, Master Bell…I, um…”

  “What is it—Ack!”

  “Kyuu!!”

  Something soft and fuzzy has jumped onto my face, which is partially turned toward Haruhime. I pull it off in a panic before I realize it’s a little monster—a Xenos rabbit wearing clothes.

  Wiene, who still has her arms around Haruhime, jerks her head up.

  “Uh, the al-miraj…Miss Aruru?”

  “Kyuu!”

  “On my way here, I was able to meet up with several of the Xenos who had been separated from the others…”

  The instant Haruhime says the word several, a number of Xenos rush into the building.

  “Bell!”

  “So we meet again, creatures of the surface!”

  “Lett! Fia!”

  There they stand, Lett the red-cap next to Fia the harpy. And there’s the hellhound…Helga, was it? Including Aruru, who is still glued to me, four of the separated Xenos are here. It seems that just like Aisha, they saw Haruhime’s magical light as she fled north from the east of the Labyrinth District to escape the adventurers ga
thered there, and they took a chance on approaching her.

  It wasn’t our original plan, but we’re all happy to be together again.

  “There’re so many of us all of a sudden…We’d really better hurry now!”

  “…Bell. I need to talk to you about that…”

  The goddess has been quiet, but now she speaks to me through the oculus.

  Meanwhile, the al-miraj is quarreling with Wiene, who’s peeled her off my head.

  “No, Aruru!”

  “Kyuu!”

  “I think you’d better give up on meeting with Fels and the others,” the goddess says.

  “Huh?”

  Everyone looks at the oculus, which Wiene has returned to me.

  “D-did something happen to Fels and the other Xenos?!”

  “No, they’re all right. They got away from Loki Familia and they’re in one of the passages leading to Knossos.”

  “In that case…”

  “There’s no way for you to get to them. When everyone heard the fighting in the west, they all gathered in the center of Daedalus Street—not only Loki Familia but other adventurers, too…”

  In a depressed voice, the goddess tells us that meeting up with Fels is hopeless.

  She’s right that it will be a huge challenge to avoid being spotted. There’s no way all of us can fit under the veil, of course. It will take too long for me to make multiple trips bringing everyone there, and Finn and his troops would surely sense our presence passing by anyway.

  We’re out of time…The fight with Aiz took too long.

  Wiene looks up at me, but I don’t know what to say. Haruhime and the other Xenos are all silent, too.

  It’s game over for us. The words of the deities loop through my mind.

  “…! Bell, take this!”

  “Huh? This…It’s the key to Knossos?!”

  I can’t help starting in surprise at the magic item that Lett offers me. As I look back at him, perplexed, he explains.

  “The last of our brethren gave it to us. He said it made no difference if he had it or not…”

  “No difference…? The Xenos said that?”

  “He said he’s going to stay here. He said he felt his dream was close by.”

  “…Is that a good thing?”

  “We couldn’t stop him…He seemed to be ceaselessly searching for something.”

  Lett lowers his eyes, and I clamp my mouth shut.